Jennifer Hoelzer’s Techdirt Profile

About Jennifer Hoelzer

from the it's-about-facts dept

While some will, no doubt, be embarrassed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program, as one of the staffers who helped make the case for the Committee’s investigation when it was initiated in 2009, I can tell you that was not its intention.

(For the record, all I did was help make the initial case for the investigation and maybe put out a press release or two. I am in no way taking credit for the tremendous work that Chairman Feinstein and her committee’s staff did on this report. By the way, I know those staffers did not trek out to the CIA site in Virginia — often in their free time — in search of our thanks and recognition, but I hope you will join me in giving it to them anyway. Because reports like this do not materialize from thin air.)

The dedicated SSCI staff — who spent tens of thousands of hours over the better part of five years researching, writing and editing this report — did so in order to ensure our nation’s interrogation programs would be grounded in what has, for too long, been missing from our nation’s interrogation debate: facts.

The interrogation techniques the CIA developed during the Bush Administration were not devised by behavioral experts with experience turning detainees into "long-term strategic sources of information." Rather, as the Department of Justice’s 2008 Inspector General’s report revealed, the FBI’s interrogation experts — with that experience — repeatedly refused to sign off on proposed interrogation plans, calling them "deeply flawed" and "completely ineffective."

The CIA’s interrogation program, instead, grew from the post-9/11 mentality that the U.S. would be best kept safe by those willing to go to the greatest extremes to protect it, or as former CIA agent Glenn Carle put it in his 2011 book The Interrogator, "Interrogating terrorists was no place for goddamn candy-asses."

FBI officials have described the interrogation-strategy sessions they observed as "circus-like." I’ve personally been told by individuals who participated in high-level discussions of U.S. interrogation policy that — as disturbing as it sounds — these conversations were more often than not informed by the participants’ recollection of episodes of the TV show 24 than by an understanding of the psychology of interrogation. Meanwhile, defenders of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation activities continue to cite the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 as justification for their actions.

As Senator Feinstein writes in her introduction to the report:

The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community's actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review.

The SSCI’s report was written to provide those lessons.

While some have and will likely continue to argue that President Obama settled the issue when he, as the president said in his statement today, "unequivocally banned torture when [he] took office," one might have argued that George Washington actually settled the issue 234 years earlier when he ordered that any American soldier who brought "shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country" by causing injury to a British prisoner could be put to death. Our "new country in the New World," Washington declared, "would distinguish itself by its humanity." And yet, two centuries after Washington gave that order, agents of the U.S. government subjected "at least five CIA detainees…to 'rectal rehydration' … without documented medical necessity."

President Obama’s executive order only settles the issue insofar as he remains president. As long as the belief persists that torture is an effective means of interrogation and anyone who doesn’t support ‘enhanced interrogation’ is a "candy ass" who lacks the necessary stomach to keep Americans safe, there is no assurance that a future president won’t take a different position than our current president.

Some have and will undoubtedly continue to argue that we shouldn’t discuss the efficacy of torture as an interrogation technique — even if it’s to prove that torture doesn’t work — because it suggests that if torture worked, it would be ok to torture people. I believe these people have a point.

The United States is more than a mass of land defined by geographic boundaries, it is a nation of people united by certain, principled beliefs, many of which our forefathers laid out at our nation’s founding. It is not enough to simply protect the people of the United States, one must also protect the principles that define the United States as a people; otherwise, there is no United States to protect. When the CIA and the Bush Administration sanctioned the torture of captured terrorists — regardless of their reasons — they made the United States something George Washington said we’d never be: a nation that tortures. One might argue that made us a little less American.

Some have and may continue to argue that making the CIA’s actions known puts Americans — particularly those serving overseas — in jeopardy. It’s worth noting that these arguments were made by people who know Senator Feinstein in an effort to persuade her not to make the committee report public. I say this is worth noting, because you do not need to know Senator Feinstein very well to know that there is nothing she wants less than to jeopardize the lives of American citizens, particularly those serving in harm’s way, and if there is an argument that would have given her second thoughts about releasing this report, that most likely would have been it.

If Americans are at risk, however, they are not at risk because the Senate Intelligence Committee is publicly acknowledging that the CIA tortured people during the Bush Administration. They’re at risk because the CIA tortured people during the Bush Administration.

The CIA put Americans at risk when they undermined the international agreements that protect Americans detained by foreign powers and sacrificed the moral authority we’ve long used to advocate for the humane treatment of detainees. They put Americans at risk when they made it harder — if not impossible — to prosecute known terrorists and keep them locked up. I'd also argue that defending the CIA’s actions, while refusing to come clean about what was done during the Bush Administration, not only fueled Al Qaeda’s hatred of Americans and put them at risk, it undermines the Obama Administration’s argument that the CIA no longer engages in torture.

Some have and may continue to argue that putting out this report will undermine morale at the CIA and derail its necessary work. Again, I'd argue that any hit to the CIA’s morale began when its agents were ordered to torture detainees without clear parameters and a solid legal foundation.

Some have and will no doubt continue to argue that an act taken to "prevent a threatened terrorist attack" is not as bad as an act taken "for the purpose of humiliation or abuse." I’d argue that torture is defined not by the torturer but by the person being tortured and that the laws governing torture were put in place because most people who engage in torture think they have a good reason.

There are some who have and will no doubt continue to argue — as they do about all things pertaining to national security — that this report shouldn’t have been made public. To respond to that I will quote directly from page 8 of the unclassified report:

The CIA's Office of Public Affairs and senior CIA officials coordinated to share classified information on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to select members of the media to counter public criticism, shape public opinion, and avoid potential congressional action to restrict the CIA's detention and interrogation authorities and budget.

If the SSCI’s report demonstrates one thing, it’s that the CIA’s unfettered ability to keep information about it’s activities secret gives it virtually limitless ability to control everyone’s understanding of its activities: from the White House and Congress to Hollywood and the American people. I have no doubt they’d argue those actions were necessary to protect national security, because in their mind — it seems — national security is harmed by anything that could potentially limit their authority to do exactly what they want. Someone should really tell them that's not how we do things in the United States.

And finally there will be some who have and will continue to argue that the CIA’s actions were necessary to protect national security. Those people, I’m guessing, need to make those arguments to help them sleep at night. To them, I’d argue the path to redemption lies not in the perpetuation of that belief, but in its eradication.

Again, please thank the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Jen Hoelzer is the former Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff for Senator Ron Wyden.

from the and-then-donate dept

The following is from Jen Hoelzer, who for years worked as Senator Ron Wyden's Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff. During the SOPA/PIPA fight, she was perhaps the key person in Congress getting the press (and others in Congress) to understand the importance of SOPA and PIPA and what it meant for the internet. This morning, completely out of the blue, she sent this over. I think it does an amazing job highlighting just how important independent coverage of important tech policy issues, like what we provide, can be on these debates. Plenty of cynical people said that the SOPA/PIPA fight couldn't be won. Those same people are saying that the net neutrality battle is already lost. Good, independent reporting on these issues does make a difference, which is why we're asking you to support us in our net neutrality coverage.

Hi. My name is Jen... and I was once a Congressional staffer who knew so little about Internet policy that I had no idea how little I knew about Internet policy. (I think this is where you're supposed to supportively say, "Hi, Jen," and reassure me that this is a safe space for me to continue my embarrassing confession. Because it gets worse.)

In late 2010, when my former boss -- U.S. Senator Ron Wyden -- announced that he was putting a hold on the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) – the predecessor to PIPA and later, SOPA -- I not only didn't know how the DNS system worked, I'm not sure I knew what infringement meant. (I'm not proud of these things, but they're true.)

If my boss hadn't involved himself in this issue, odds are I would never have heard of it and, heck, if by some chance I had learned that the Judiciary Committee had unanimously passed legislation giving law enforcement (what their press release called) "important tools" to go after illegal activity, I probably wouldn't have given the issue any thought beyond thinking it was nice that Democrats and Republicans remembered how to work together.

Worse yet, when my chief of staff stopped by my office to let me know that the Senator would be placing a hold on the legislation, I didn't drop what I was doing to alert reporters or ask one of my deputies to pound out a press release. I'm not sure I even looked up from my computer.

Honestly, it didn't occur to me that anyone would consider what my boss did that afternoon news, until I got a Google News Alert that a blog called, Techdirt, had written about it.

Now, in my defense, the above does not mean that I was lazy or willfully ignorant. From the outside, I realize Congress doesn't appear to do anything, but there are so many bills and issues swirling around Capitol Hill at any one time that it's a challenge just to stay on top of the sliver of them that pertains to your job. On an average day, Senator Wyden could go from a breakfast forum on health reform, to a committee hearing on tax reform, to introducing legislation on renewable energy, to questioning the forest service on resources for firefighting, before giving a floor speech on NSA surveillance, and that would just be before noon. So, the odds of my being on top of something that happened in a Committee my boss wasn't assigned to -- like the Judiciary Committee -- were slim.

Furthermore, my deputies and I -- as Wyden's communications director -- could barely keep up with all of the questions and requests we got from reporters. We didn't have the time or resources to tweet about everything he did, let alone proactively promote all of his work. I mean, just writing and distributing a press release can take a few hours, coming up with a messaging strategy, educating reporters, planning events and writing the various one-pagers, FAQs, op-eds and speeches needed to support a successful advocacy campaign can take days, weeks, even months and that's if nothing else is going on (which is rarely the case).

The day Senator Wyden put a hold on COICA, was the same day he introduced legislation to amend the Affordable Care Act with Senator Scott Brown. I was getting inundated with questions from reporters and bloggers wanting to understand "why in the hell he'd do such a thing," plus the Democratic caucus wanted us to put out and promote a statement pushing for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which had my deputy tied up, in addition to the various other things that tended to make the end of session a sprint.

I didn't jump at the opportunity to publicize my boss's hold announcement, because I didn't know enough about the issue to judge its news value, let alone explain it to reporters or write a quick press release, and I didn't have the time to learn enough about it to do any of those things before the end of the day. So, I told my chief of staff "great" and went back to talking to reporters about health policy.

Again, I'm not proud of the above story, but I was moved to share it, when I read that Techdirt's coverage of the COICA/PIPA/SOPA debate ultimately cost them more than 50% of their advertising revenue and has since forced them to operate at a loss.

I don't want to imagine a tech debate without Techdirt in it.

I can't even begin to imagine how the COICA/PIPA/SOPA debate would have gone without Mike Masnick and Techdirt's coverage.

But I can imagine where I -- personally -- would have been without Techdirt's coverage. All I have to do is close my eyes and remember November 18, 2010. Now, as much as I'd like to tell you that Mike's November post on Ron Wyden's COICA hold changed everything for me, it didn't. One post couldn't make me an expert on Internet issues any more than a single story could have won the debate. But I can say the more I learned about the issues surrounding COICA and later PIPA and SOPA – and the more confident I grew in my knowledge and ability to explain those issues -- the more involved I got, the more press releases, speeches, FAQ's and blogs I wrote in support of Ron's work, the more reporters I talked to, coverage I influenced, and interviews I secured for the senator.

I can also say, I wouldn't have been able to do any of those things (at least not well) without Mike Masnick and the rest of the guys at Techdirt, because they're the guys who taught me tech policy.

That's not to say, I didn't work with really smart people who taught me a lot, I did and they did; but with Techdirt, I never had to ask a stupid question or admit what I didn't know. (I just kept reading.) Techdirt's posts were consistently straightforward, easy to understand and timely. Sure, another site might put together one or two good posts or a definitive explainer, but reading Techdirt every day was like taking a college course on the issues with every new post helping me understand a new aspect of what I'd learned previously. I often found some of the site's shorter posts and illustrative examples the most helpful, because they were the examples I ultimately used to explain the issues to others. For example, I've yet to find a better way to get someone to see the potential harm bills like SOPA and PIPA can do to free speech than pointing out that Universal once tried to blacklist 50 Cent's personal website, a fact I learned from a 6/21/11 Techdirt post, entitled "Did Universal Music Declare 50 Cent's Own Website A Pirate Site?" (Seriously, that story alone helped me convince at least a dozen – non-tech – reporters to write about the issue, not to mention all of the Hill staffers I shared it with.)

Now, I understand that some of you may be tempted to write my experience off as unique (or flame me for asking you to sympathize with Congressional staffers), but I guarantee not having enough hours in the day was not an affliction unique to my experience. I'd also argue that good lobbyists derive less power from campaign contributions than they do from helping tired, overworked, Congressional staffers "understand" complex issues.

Lobbyists are experts at framing their client's positions in ways that sound like non-controversial no-brainers. They're so good at it, that most of them have even been convinced by their own arguments. A seasoned staffer who understands the issue at play will see through the lobbyist's ploy (and realize the offers of assistance aren't really "help"), but there aren't very many seasoned staffers who work on Internet and tech policy. To create those staffers and make the lobbyist's job harder, means helping those overworked staffers learn these issues, with short, easily digestible information that makes the problems with the lobbyists' sales pitch easy to discern. And, speaking from experience, no one is better at that than Techdirt.

Now, one of the sad realities of our political system is the fact that helping for-profit entities maintain the advantages that made them profitable pays a lot more than advocating for the public interest, which – if you're lucky – might yield you a pat on the back. But just because something isn't done for the money, doesn't mean those who do it don't have to earn a living. Saving the Internet shouldn't force Mike's staff to take pay cuts or his kids to go hungry.

If you care about a free and open Internet, you want Techdirt to be at full strength in the Net Neutrality debate. You want them to be educating more lawmakers and their staffers (like my former self) to understand these issues and be confident enough in their knowledge to take a stand against the cable companies and their lobbyists.

I'm donating to Techdirt's campaign because I know where I would have been without their work and I don't want a tech debate to take place without them. I hope you will do the same. It's also a great way to say thanks.

from the because-it-sure-was-a-mess dept

Since details of the NSA's surveillance programs started coming to light in early June -- and President Obama's been forced to publicly answer for its activities -- the president has repeatedly reminded us that he came into office with a "healthy skepticism about these programs." But, after careful evaluation, he determined "that on, you know, net, it was worth doing."

Some of these programs I had been critical of when I was in the Senate. When I looked through specifically what was being done, my determination was that the two programs in particular that had been at issue, 215 and 702, offered valuable intelligence that helps us protect the American people and they're worth preserving. (From his August 9th Press Conference.)

It's a rhetorical strategy intended to win his critics' trust by demonstrating that he understands our concerns because he used to share them. The message he wants us to take away is: if we had been in his shoes and saw the evidence he saw when he got into office, we would have signed off on these programs too.

Well, this week we got a glimpse of some of the evidence he saw when he assumed office -- at least in connection to the NSA's collection of U.S. phone call records -- and, it begs the question, what exactly changed his mind about the NSA's domestic surveillance programs? What did the President see that led him to the conclusion that everything he had previously said on the topic was wrong because allowing the NSA to collect everyone's phone call records really is a constitutionally-supported, great idea?

Because, according to the documents the ODNI released this week, when President Obama took office, the NSA's "telephony metadata" program wasn't getting stellar reviews. In fact, we now know that days prior to Obama’s inauguration, the NSA reported that it had repeatedly violated the court-ordered rules limiting its use of the data it was collecting. A little over a month later, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that, "Since January 15 [five days before Obama's inauguration] it has finally come to light that the FISC's authorizations of this vast collection program have been premised on a flawed depiction of how the NSA uses" the phone call data.

Not only had the Intelligence Community been misrepresenting its program to the court, the judge, Reggie B. Walton, went on to write

The minimization procedures proposed by the government in each successive application and approved and adopted as binding by the orders of the FISC have been so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall BR regime has never functioned effectively.

And,

To approve such a program, the Court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the Court's orders. The Court no longer has such confidence.

The judge also implied that -- other than hypothetical examples of how this data might provide intelligence of "immense value to the government" -- the government had yet to provide the court with concrete evidence that the program was actually providing that value.

This program has been ongoing for nearly three years. The time has come for the government to describe to the Court how, based on the information collected and analyzed during that time, the value of the program to the nation's security justifies the continued collection and retention of massive quantities of U.S. person information.

Again, Judge Walton reached these conclusions based on evidence that was available to him at the very same time that I imagine President Obama and his team were evaluating these programs. Plus, I'm assuming the president considered Judge Walton's opinion in his evaluation, right?

Jennifer Hoelzer is a long-time Congressional staffer with tremendous expertise on national security issues. This story is cross-posted from from her site, with permission, but you should check out her site for more insightful analysis of national security issues.

from the that's-just-not-true dept

Many of you quite enjoyed former Ron Wyden deputy chief of staff, Jennifer Hoelzer's post a few weeks ago, and we're bringing you another post by her, this one crossposted from her own blog where she's going to be covering these kinds of issues. We encourage you to head over there now and to visit it often.

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, would very much like you to view the previously classified documents his office released last month as proof that the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance activities have not only been subjected to vigorous oversight, they have taken it seriously.

I mean, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) didn’t just declassify the long sought Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion that indicated the NSA’s foreign intelligence collection activities haven’t been as problem free as the administration’s suggested.

No, the ODNI – not exactly known for its fondness for declassification - also declassified the government’s response to the FISC opinion, and the FISC opinion on the government’s response to the original FISC opinion, and the minimization procedures the NSA uses “in connection with acquisitions of foreign intelligence information pursuant to Section 702” and the “Semi-Annual Assessment of Compliance with the Procedures and Guidelines issued pursuant to Section 702” plus all of the previously classified testimony the Administration gave to Congress discussing 702, including a memo that the administration had previously made available to members of Congress in which they described FISC’s having raised concerns about the Administration’s collection activities as an example of “how well the existing oversight regime works.” (An ironic choice of words given that they were being used to describe a legal opinion in which a federal judge used a footnote to smack the Administration for substantially misrepresenting the “scope of a major collection program”)

And, if all of that information wasn’t enough to convince you that FISC’s concerns about the Administration’s compliance with Section 702 of the FAA were nothing when compared to the extraordinary efforts the government employs to ensure that these programs are conducted with respect to the rule of law, the Director of National Intelligence himself wrote a three page cover letter to accompany the release of these documents. The letter acknowledged that the court had determined that:

For highly technical reasons…the minimization procedures proposed by the government as applied to a discrete subset of NSA’s upstream collection of electronic communications did not satisfy certain statutory requirements in FISA and that the targeting and minimization procedures as applied to the same subset of communications did not satisfy Fourth Amendment requirements.

But – if you followed that -- fear not! Because, “In the end,” the DNI wrote:

the Government satisfied the concerns raised by the Court and the Court found that the revised procedures satisfied the law and the Constitution. These documents reflect the Government’s serious commitment to getting it right and the Court’s careful and searching review of matters within its jurisdiction.

For the record, I don’t blame the DNI for being defensive. While his actions have left plenty of room for criticism, James Clapper is not a bad guy. He’s not slaughtering puppies or making millions gambling with people’s home mortgages. In fact, in any other context, I’m pretty sure we’d be calling him a hero. Not only is he a decorated veteran, who spent thirty-two years in uniform, including two combat tours in Southeast Asia, at 73-years-old, he continues to work seven days a week for a government salary in an effort to keep Americans safe.

That’s not to say I agree with his approach to keeping Americans safe. I don’t. But I don’t doubt that his heart is in the right place and I can only imagine how much it must suck to have the public he’s dedicated his life to protect turn on him with such anger.

Problem is, though, he’s wrong.

The plethora of documents General Clapper declassified are not proof that Intelligence Community oversight is working, because despite what General Clapper says, the government did not satisfy all of the concerns that the Court raised about the Administration’s Section 702 collections activities.

For those following along at home, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act gives the Administration the authority to collect an American citizen’s communications (without a warrant) if – and only if – their communications are collected incidental to the Intelligence Community’s efforts to collect the communications of a foreigner.

In other words, if the NSA wants to collect a foreigner’s emails, it can basically download everything in that foreigner’s gmail account directly into the U.S. government database without worrying that some of the emails in that account might be from an American citizen. Obviously, if the government was targeting that American citizen directly, it would need a warrant to collect and read those emails, but thanks to Section 702 of the FAA, if the government unintentionally collects an American citizen's calls or emails, it can review them without a warrant.

In October 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that the NSA had been violating both FAA and the Fourth Amendment by scooping up tens of thousands of “wholly domestic” communications that had nothing to do with a targeted foreigner. This was attributed to the technical challenges of collecting multiple communications at once and the administration found a way to resolve the problem and address the Court’s concerns.

But, if you turn to page 33 and 34 of the FISA Court’s October 3, 2011 opinion. You’ll see that that wasn’t the Court’s only concern about the NSA’s Section 702 collection activities:

…in addition to these MCT’s, NSA likely acquires tens of thousands more wholly domestic communications every year, given that NSA’s upstream collection devices will acquire a wholly domestic ‘about’ SCT if it is routed internationally.

(For the record, the FISA Court underlined “more,” not me.)

What this means is the NSA isn’t just collecting emails sent to and from a targeted foreigner’s email address, they are collecting emails that include the targeted foreigner’s email address in the body of the message. So, if a friend asks you to forward them an email address, if that email address belongs to a targeted foreigner, your email could end up in the government database even if both you and your friend are American citizens located in the United States.

If you flip to page 48 of FISC’s opinion, you’ll see that the Court has definite concerns about this:

Given that NSA’s upstream collection devices lack the capacity to detect wholly domestic communications at the time an Internet transaction is acquired, the Court is inexorably led to the conclusion that the targeting procedures are “reasonably designed” to prevent the intentional acquisition of any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States. This is true despite the fact that the NSA knows with certainty that upstream collection, viewed as a whole, results in the acquisition of wholly domestic communications.

By expanding its Section 702 acquisitions to include the acquisition of Internet transactions through its upstream collection, NSA, has, as a practical matter, circumvented the spirit of Section 1881 a(b)(4) and (d)(1) with regard to that collection. NSA’s knowing acquisition of tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications through its upstream collection is a cause for concern for the court.

[Note: If you aren’t familiar with the word “inexorably” its legal speak for “not to be persuaded.” As in the court isn’t persuaded that the NSA’s targeting procedures have been “reasonably designed” to prevent the intentional collection of wholly domestic communications.]

So, the court raised concerns that the NSA is actively collecting emails that mention targeted foreigners even though the NSA knows they’ll likely collect tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications each year. This, the court says, violates the spirit of Section 702 of the FAA, which explicitly prohibits the government from “knowingly” collecting wholly domestic communications.

The IC did not address this concern. And, if you refer to page 4 of the memo that the ODNI sent the Intelligence Committees on May 4, 2012 to argue for FAA’s reauthorization, you will see that this collection is ongoing.

“[Upstream collection] lets the NSA collect electronic communications that contain the targeted e-mail address in the body of a communications between third parties.”

[I think it’s worth noting that in mentioning this capability to Congress, the Administration failed to mention that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had raised concerns that this practice violates the spirit of the FAA.]

Why does this matter? I mean if one American is forwarding a terrorist’s address to another American, that email is clearly “relevant” to a terrorism investigation and should be collected, right?

Not exactly. Just because an email contains the address of a “targeted foreigner” does not mean it has anything to do with terrorism, because Section 702 does not limit surveillance to terrorism suspects.

Rather, Section 702 applies to all foreign intelligence gathering for any foreign intelligence purpose. Which means that the government can use its Section 702 authority to target basically any foreigner that it thinks might have information the U.S. government might find useful. This can include: foreign officials, business people, journalists, human rights advocates, etc. etc.

So, while it may be reasonable to assume that two Americans sharing a terrorist’s email address are probably up to no good, I can think of a whole lot of very innocent reasons that one American might share the email address of a targeted foreigner with another. Heck, just last month, I shared a foreign reporter’s email address with a friend who was looking for a hotel recommendation for his dad. Did that email end up in a government database?

Again, why should you care? That information is only being used for terrorist investigations, right?

No. As recently disclosed documents reveal, the Administration believes that as long as communications are “lawfully” collected, the government doesn’t need a warrant to use them for other purposes. In other words, while the government would need to get a warrant to read your emails, the government does not need a warrant to read emails that it may have “accidentally” collected on you. (The fact that it didn’t need a warrant to collect those emails in the first place is considered irrelevant.)

My former boss, attempted to close this loophole in early 2012, when, during a closed Intelligence Committee mark-up, he introduced an amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would have required the government to get a warrant before being allowed to search the government database for the name of an American citizen.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable. If the government has a legitimate cause to target an American it can get a warrant to search the database. Meanwhile, warrant requirements could prevent LOVEINT-esque incidents in which NSA personnel might be tempted to search the database for names that they have no legitimate, foreign intelligence reason to target.

But, despite the President’s oft-repeated claims that the government can not read an American’s emails and/or listen to the content of their conversations without a warrant, the administration quietly opposed Wyden’s attempt to require government agents to get warrants to do just that.

To their credit, after quashing Congress’s attempt to limit the executive branch’s authority, the executive branch appears to have issued an alert that analysts should not query the database for the name of a U.S. person “until an effective oversight process has been developed by NSA and agreed to by DOJ/ODNI.” That is, of course, better than nothing, but am I the only one who thinks it’s a problem that the only entity conducting oversight over the Intelligence Community is the Intelligence Community?

Again, as you can see from the ODNI’s rollout of FISC’s Section 702 opinions, Director Clapper would very much like you to believe that the Intelligence Community is “commit[ed] to detecting, correcting, and reporting mistakes, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes.” But is the IC as committed to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that others identify?

We’ve been told that the Intelligence Community has implemented safeguards that it believes to be effective. It is declassifying the documents that it believes are in the public’s best interests to see, and when they tell you they “satisfied the concerns raised by the court,” they mean they satisfied the court’s concerns that they decided were worth satisfying. (Which, again, is not the same as saying the Intelligence Community satisfied all of the Court’s concerns.)

And let’s not forget, the Intelligence Community is engaged in these surveillance activities because they believe they are necessary to national security.

But is any of that the same as saying these programs are being subjected to effective oversight?

Doesn’t oversight imply that your work is being reviewed by someone who has an incentive to raise concerns and/or might catch something you may have missed? Doesn’t the fact that the NSA apparently didn’t think to implement safeguards to its database query process until AFTER Senator Wyden raised concerns about it suggest that maybe the NSA isn’t catching all of its mistakes and outside oversight can be a good thing?

Because, I’m sorry, I have a hard time believing that the administration is committed to oversight, when the only oversight it appears to be committed to is oversight conducted by folks that agree with what they are doing. Also – and maybe this isn’t fair – I have a hard time trusting the Intelligence Community to identify and correct possible problems related to its secret surveillance programs, when no one in the IC apparently noticed that there might be a problem with the name of its new Tumblr account: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/. But maybe that’s just me.

from the and-also-the-favorites-of-the-week dept

In a bit of fortuitous timing, this week we had asked former deputy chief of staff for Ron Wyden, Jennifer Hoelzer, to do our weekly "Techdirt Favorites of the Week" post, in which we have someone from the wider Techdirt community tell us what their favorite posts on the site were. As you'll see below, Hoelzer has a unique and important perspective on this whole debate concerning NSA surveillance, and given the stories that came out late Friday, she chose to ditch her original post on favorites and rewrite the whole thing from scratch last night (and into this morning). Given that, it's much, much more than a typical "favorites of the week" post, and thus we've adjusted the title appropriately. I hope you'll read through this in its entirety for a perspective on what's happening that not many have.

Tim Cushing made one of my favorite points of the week in his Tuesday post "Former NSA Boss Calls Snowden's Supporters Internet Shut-ins; Equates Transparency Activists With Al-Qaeda," when he explained that "some of the most ardent defenders of our nation's surveillance programs" -- much like proponents of overreaching cyber-legislation, like SOPA -- have a habit of "belittling" their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners." I think it's worth pointing out that General Hayden's actual rhetoric is even more inflammatory than Cushing's. Not only did the former NSA director call us "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years," he equates transparency groups like the ACLU with al Qaeda.

I appreciated this post for two reasons:

First of all, it does a great job of illustrating a point that I've long made when asked for advice on communicating tech issues, which is that the online community is as diverse and varied as the larger world we live in. Of course, we are more likely to come across the marginal opinions of twenty-somethings with social anxiety online because, unlike the larger world, the Internet gives those twenty-somethings just as much of an opportunity to be heard as a Harvard scholar, a dissident protesting for democracy or General Hayden himself.

Sure, it can be infuriating to read scathingly hostile comments written by troubled individuals who clearly didn't take the time to read the post you spent countless hours carefully writing (not that that has ever happened to me) but isn't one of the things that makes the Internet so darn special its unwavering reminder that free speech includes speech we don't appreciate? Of course, that's a point that tends to get lost on folks -- like General Hayden -- who don't seem to understand that equating the entirety of the online world with terrorists is a lot like posting a scathing comment to a story without reading it. You can't expect someone to treat you or your opinion with respect -- online or anywhere else -- when you're being disrespectful. And I can imagine no greater disrespect for the concepts of transparency and oversight than to equate them with the threats posed by terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

But my main reason for singling out Tim's post this week is that Hayden's remark goes to the heart of what I continue to find most offensive about the Administration's handling of the NSA surveillance programs, which is their repeated insinuation that anyone who raises concerns about national security programs doesn't care about national security. As Tim explains this "attitude fosters the "us vs. them" antagonism so prevalent in these agencies dealings with the public. The NSA (along with the FBI, DEA and CIA) continually declares the law is on its side and portrays its opponents as ridiculous dreamers who believe safety doesn't come with a price."

To understand why I find this remark so offensive, I should probably tell you a little about myself. While the most identifying aspect of my resume is probably the six years I spent as U.S. Senator Ron Wyden's communications director and later deputy chief of staff, I started college at the U.S. Naval Academy and spent two years interning for the National Security Council. I had a Top Secret SCI clearance when I was 21 years old and had it not been for an unusual confluence of events nearly 15 years ago -- including a chance conversation with a patron of the bar I tended in college -- I might be working for the NSA today. I care very deeply about national security. Moreover -- and this is what the Obama Administration and other proponents of these programs fail to understand -- I was angry at the Administration for its handling of these programs long before I knew what the NSA was doing. That had a lot to do with the other thing you should probably know about me: during my tenure in Wyden's office, I probably spent in upwards of 1,000 hours trying to help my boss raise concerns about programs that he couldn't even tell me about.

"What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation," Obama said. "It's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process."

I hope you won't mind if I take a moment to respond to that.

Really, Mr. President? Do you really expect me to believe that you give a damn about open debate and the democratic process? Because it seems to me if your Administration was really committed to those things, your Administration wouldn't have blocked every effort to have an open debate on these issues each time the laws that your Administration claims authorizes these programs came up for reauthorization, which -- correct me if I am wrong -- is when the democratic process recommends as the ideal time for these debates.

For example, in June 2009, six months before Congress would have to vote to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the Obama Administration claims gives the NSA the authority to collect records on basically every American citizen -- whether they have ever or will ever come in contact with a terrorist -- Senators Wyden, Feingold and Durbin sent Attorney General Eric Holder a classified letter "requesting the declassification of information which [they] argued was critical for a productive debate on reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act."

"The PATRIOT Act was passed in a rush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Sunsets were attached to the Act's most controversial provisions, to permit better-informed, more deliberative consideration of them at a later time. Now is the time for that deliberative consideration, but informed discussion is not possible when most members of Congress - and nearly all of the American public - lack important information about the issue."

Did President Obama jump at the opportunity to embrace the democratic process and have an open debate then? No. Congress voted the following month to reauthorize the Patriot Act without debate.

In May 2011, before the Senate was -- again -- scheduled to vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, Senators Wyden and Udall -- again -- called for the declassification of the Administration’s secret interpretation of Section 215. This time, in a Huffington Post Op-Ed entitled "How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law?" they wrote:

Members of Congress are about to vote to extend the most controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act for four more years, even though few of them understand how those provisions are being interpreted and applied.

As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people -- including many Members of Congress -- think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do.

Legal scholars, law professors, advocacy groups, and the Congressional Research Service have all written interpretations of the Patriot Act and Americans can read any of these interpretations and decide whether they support or agree with them. But by far the most important interpretation of what the law means is the official interpretation used by the U.S. government and this interpretation is -- stunningly --classified.

What does this mean? It means that Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret. Most members of Congress have not even seen the secret legal interpretations that the executive branch is currently relying on and do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. Even if these members come down to the Intelligence Committee and read these interpretations themselves, they cannot openly debate them on the floor without violating classification rules.

During the debate itself, Wyden and Udall offered an amendment to declassify the Administration's legal interpretation of its Patriot Act surveillance authorities and, in a twenty minute speech on the Senate floor, Wyden warned that the American people would one day be outraged to learn that the government was engaged in surveillance activities that many Americans would assume were illegal, just as they were every other time the national security committee has tried to hide its questionable activities from the American people.

Fun aside: As you can see in the video, to underscore the point that hiding programs from the American people rarely goes well for the Administration, I had my staff make a poster of the famous image of Oliver North testifying before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearing. I really wanted to replace North’s face with the words “insert your photo here,” but we didn't have the time.

Did President Obama welcome an open debate at that time?

No. Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act for four more years and the only point we -- as critics -- could raise that might be confused with debate was a hypothetical argument illustrated with a twenty-year-old picture of Oliver North. And, again, Senator Wyden couldn't even tell me what he was so concerned about. In strategy meetings with me and his Intelligence Committee staffer, I had to repeatedly leave the room when the conversation strayed towards details they couldn't share with me because I no longer had an active security clearance. "You know, it would be a lot easier if you could just tell me what I can't say?" I'd vent in frustration. They agreed, but still asked me to leave the room.

And that was just the Patriot Act. Did the President -- who now claims to welcome open debate of his Administration's surveillance authorities -- jump at the opportunity to have such a debate when the FISA Amendments Act came up for reauthorization?

No. Not only did the Administration repeatedly decline Senator Wyden's request for a "ballpark figure" of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, just a month after the Patriot Act reauthorization, the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to quietly pass a four year reauthorization of the controversial surveillance law by spinning it as an effort to: "Synchronize the various sunset dates included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to June 1, 2015;" So, I guess if this was part of the Administration's plan to publicly debate the NSA's surveillance authorities, the plan was for the debate to take place in 2015?

And, as I explained in an interview with Brian Beutler earlier this summer, that is just a fraction of the ways the Obama Administration and the Intelligence Communities ignored and even thwarted our attempts to consult the public on these surveillance programs before they were reauthorized. In fact, after the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in which Wyden attempted to close the FAA's Section 702 loophole, which another important Techdirt post this week explains, "gives the NSA 'authority' to run searches on Americans without any kind of warrant," I -- as Wyden’s spokesperson -- was specifically barred from explaining the Senator's opposition to the legislation to the reporters. In fact, the exact response I was allowed to give reporters was:

"We've been told by Senator Feinstein's staff that under the SSCI's Committee Rule 9.3, members and staff are prohibited from discussing the markup or describing the contents of the bill until the official committee report is released. The fact that they've already put out a press release does not lift this prohibition."

That's right, supporters of a full scale reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act put out a press release explaining why this was a good thing, while explicitly barring the Senator who voted against the legislation from explaining his concerns.

Months later, the FISA Amendments Act, which the Administration contends authorizes its PRISM program, passed without the open debate that the President now contends he wanted all along. And, again, I'm only touching on a fraction of the efforts just Senator Wyden made to compel the administration to engage the American people in a democratic debate. I, obviously, haven't mentioned the Director of National Intelligence's decision to lie when Wyden "asked whether the NSA had collected 'any type of data at all on millions of Americans.'" (Btw: Given that Wyden shared his question with the ODNI the day before the hearing, I am highly skeptical that Clapper's decision to lie was made unilaterally.) Or the fact that the Obama Administration repeatedly fought lawsuits and FOIA requests for, again -- not sources and methods -- but the Section 215 legal interpretation that the Administration claims authorizes its surveillance authorities.

The below is an excerpt from a March 2012 letter that Wyden and Udall sent the Obama Administration urging them to respect the democratic process:

The Justice Department's motion to dismiss these Freedom of Information Act lawsuits argues that it is the responsibility of the executive branch to determine the best way to protect the secrecy of intelligence sources and methods. While this is indeed a determination for the executive branch to make, we are concerned that the executive branch has developed a practice of bypassing traditional checks and balances and treating these determinations as dispositive in all cases. In other words, when intelligence officials argue that something should stay secret, policy makers often seem to defer to them without carefully considering the issue themselves. We have great respect for our nation's intelligence officers, the vast majority of whom are hard-working and dedicated professionals. But intelligence officials are specialists -- it is their job to determine how to collect as much information as possible, but it is not their job to balance the need for secrecy with the public's right to know how the law is being interpreted. That responsibility rests with policy makers, and we believe that responsibility should not be delegated lightly.

But, as Mike's last post on Friday explains, "President Obama flat out admitted that this was about appeasing a public that doesn't trust the administration, not about reducing the surveillance." Mike's insight continues:

Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn't trust the government. That's because he keeps insisting that the program isn't being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that's not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place.

I'd go even further than that and argue that a big part of the reason the American people are having a hard time trusting their government is that the public's trust in government is harmed every time the American people learn that their government is secretly doing something they not only assumed was illegal but that government officials specifically told them they weren't doing. Hint: When the American people learn that you lied to them, they trust you less.

I think it's hard for the American people to trust their President when he says he respects democratic principles, when his actions over the course of nearly five years demonstrate very little respect for democratic principles.

I think the American people would be more likely to trust the President when he says these programs include safeguards that protect their privacy, if he -- or anyone else in his administration -- seemed to care about privacy rights or demonstrated an understanding of how the information being collected could be abused. Seriously, how are we supposed to trust safeguards devised by people who don't believe there is anything to safeguard against?

I think it's understandably hard for the American people to trust the President when he says his Administration has the legal authority to conduct these surveillance programs when one of the few things that remains classified about these programs is the legal argument that the administration says gives the NSA the authority to conduct these programs. This is the document that explains why the Administration believes the word "relevant" gives them the authority to collect everything. It's also the document I'd most like to see since it's the document my former boss has been requesting be declassified for more than half a decade. (A reporter recently asked me why I think the Administration
won't just declassify the legal opinion given that the sources and methods it relates to have already been made public. "I think that's pretty obvious," I said. "I believe it will be much harder for the Administration to claim that these programs are legal, if people can see their legal argument.")

I think it's hard for the American people to trust the President when his administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to silence critics and -- again -- treat oversight as a threat on par with al Qaeda. As another great Techdirt post this week -- US Releases Redacted Document Twice... With Different Redactions -- illustrates, many of the Intelligence Community's classification decisions seem to be based more on a desire to avoid criticism than clear national security interests. And as Senator Wyden said back in 2007, when then CIA Director Hayden (yes, the same guy who thinks we're all losers who can't get laid) attempted to undermine oversight over his agency by launching an investigation into the CIA's inspector general, "people who know that they're doing the right thing aren't afraid of oversight."

Not much more information is given, other than announced plans to fight against the government in court. Reading between the lines, it seems rather obvious that Lavabit has been ordered to either disclose private information or grant access to its secure email accounts, and the company is taking a stand and shutting down the service while continuing the legal fight. It's also clear that the court has a gag order on Levison, limiting what can be said.

The part that haunted me, though, was a line Levon included in his email informing customers of his decision:

"I feel you deserve to know what’s going on," he wrote. "The first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this."

He's right, isn't he? If these aren't the moments the First Amendment was meant for, what are? Moreover, if the Administration is so convinced that its requests of Labavit are just, why are they afraid to hold them up to public scrutiny?

In his book, Secrecy: The American Experience, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan included a quote from a 1960 report issued by the House Committee on Operations which I believe provides a far better response than anything I could write on my own:

Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society for a fully informed public is the basis of self government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than its people.

Which brings me to my final point (at least for now) I think it's awfully hard for the American people to trust the President and his administration when their best response to the concerns Americans are raising is to denigrate the Americans raising those concerns. Because, you see, I have a hard time understanding why my wanting to stand up for democratic principles makes me unpatriotic, while the ones calling themselves patriots seem to think so little of the people and the principles that comprise the country they purport to love.

Jennifer Hoelzer’s Comments

A smart person once told me that people express cynicism to make themselves sound smart on a subject. The idea being that you've got to know an awful lot about a subject to say something positive about it, but you don't need to know very much to express cynicism.

That said, I know there is a lot to be angry and cynical about here, but as someone who's been working on these issues for years, let me tell you: This report is a very important step w/out which none of the things you want would be possible.

Leaving aside the fact that producing this "small step" required a team of people to spend tens of thousands of hours combing through more than 6 million documents, not to mention what it takes to write a several thousand page report...and then a year, plus a head-on confrontation with the CIA and the White House to get it made public, prior to the release of this report, those of us in government and out who wanted to push for any sort of change or steps to be taken against these guys had zero ammunition. We could talk about feelings and hunches, but there were no hard facts to point to, nothing we could hold up to say Cheney and Hayden are lying. Hell, we didn't even have enough facts on our side (at least that we could point to) to discredit Zero Dark Thirty, let alone prosecute anyone.

The reason Cheney et al have gotten away with this for as long as they have is that they've controlled the facts. They knew that it's next to impossible for anyone outside of the intelligence community to get something they've stamped classified unclassified. (Look at the legal rulings w/ re: to our attempts to force the declassification of FISC rulings pertaining to NSA data collection - the administration fought our argument that it's a misuse of the classification system to classify legal documents by arguing that since the intelligence community determines what is and is not a proper use of the classification system, then anything the IC classifies must be properly classified....and the court, of course, agreed.)

Anyway, the torture debate we've had the last 13+ years is the torture debate you get when the only facts anyone could publicly point to were the ones put out by those defending torture at the CIA. So, instead of throwing in the towel or simply moving on to other things (as basically everyone else did), the staff of the senate intelligence committee spent five years putting together an airtight, fact-based report discrediting anyone who dares to claim this program did anything but harm our nation's national security. I'm not saying anyone will get prosecuted, but this report is the thing that makes prosecution possible. More importantly, though, in my mind, this report is what gets held up the next time someone suggests we should torture someone. It's also what gets held up the next time the CIA says "just trust us."

I'm sorry that the response hasn't been fast or big enough for you, trust me, I know how frustrating it can be, but if you care about this issue as much as you say you do, stop whining about the people who've been killing themselves to do something about it, take the report they wrote and demand change. Write your members of congress, write the justice department, write the president tell them you want/expect action. You may not think they'll pay attention, but i promise you they're a lot more likely to pay attention to a letter you send them than your comments on Techdirt. Beyond that, use your voice. When you see people like Cheney and Hayden lying call them out on it, post links to the report in your comments, organize a boycott of Meet the Press sponsors the next time they book Mike Hayden or write the ombudsman at the New York Times the next time you see Cheney's comments published as fact....

Again, if you want action to be taken here stop complaining that the people on your side aren't working to your satisfaction and HELP them. An elected official is only as powerful as the army he/she has behind him. Either get on board and be part of that army or thank the folks who are out there working for the change you'd like to see, but aren't trying to bring about yourself.

As I said, thank you letters can be addressed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 211 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510

I think "not torturing' people is one of those principles, but free speech would probably be the best example. It's such a ubiquitous part of our identity as Americans that we pretty much take it for granted, but - to my point - when an action is proposed or taken that would limit free speech, we tend to refer to it as "un-American." Regardless, I stand by my statement that the United States is more than a geographically defined landmass.

I think "not torturing' people is one of those principles, but free speech would probably be the best example. It's such a ubiquitous part of our identity as Americans that we pretty much take it for granted, but - to my point - when an action is proposed or taken that would limit free speech, we tend to refer to it as "un-American." Regardless, I stand by my statement that the United States is more than a geographically defined landmass.

I was talking about the IC's direct attempts to control the message/understanding of their activities: whether it was giving half truths/only sharing one side of the story with Congress & the White House to convincing the creators of Zero Dark Thirty that torture led to the capture of UBL to ultimately shaping how the American people understand what their government is doing. I didn't order them that way as a hierarchy. (As a literary device, I actually tend to put the most important last, because the last gets word in a sentence gets the most attention/focus.) But here, I was thinking more about the sequence of attention the CIA gave each of these groups and while they were trying to shape public perceptions, they didn't really talk directly to the American people (unless they were talking through the media or Hollywood.) But really, I included Hollywood in there because i'm still ticked about Zero Dark Thirty.... (yes, i know this is a ridiculously ramblely answer, but I don't have time this AM to edit. Have a great day.)

So, when i first heard that only the exec summary of the report was going to be made public, i was more than a little disappointed. But now seeing what the committee staff did, I'm kind of blown away by how smart and strategic they were. First off, you'e got to remember that whatever they wrote they needed the exec branch to declassify it (only the exec branch has classification authorities) and they had to assume they were only going to get the admin to agree to a partial declassification to start. So, what did they do? They wrote a 500+ page exec summary, laying out all of their findings, with evidence and very minimal references to information that would need to be redacted. (In other words this exec summary was written to be made public and back the admin into a corner to do it. Brilliant.)

Yes, I think the rest of the report will likely - someday - be made public, but I think Sen Feinstein makes a good argument in her introduction that they knew it would be such a fight to get this declassified (and it was) that they decided to start with this and push for the declassification of the rest at a later day. But again, what they forced the CIA to declassify is very solid and very informative.

Drones will obviously be a much harder sell. Again, the exec branch are the only ones with the power to declassify, and unlike the detention and interrogation programs, the drone program is ongoing. That said, though, the more it becomes clear that the CIA's abuse of its power to keep things secret is leading to a lack of public trust, the more pressure they'll face to be forthcoming. (I think the last 2 years have been a seachange for the intel community in terms of the ability to hide behind secrecy and it will be interested to see where this leads. Would be nice if it was someplace good.)

Yes, I would argue that the folks who will be most vulnerable to this will most likely be senior citizens, who are the least tech savvy and the biggest consumers of health care. I mean, these scam sites wouldn't invest in this stuff if they weren't making money off of them, so I think it's pretty safe to assume that someone's getting scammed.

I'd also argue that the threat here isn't just scam sites looking for ways to cheat your grandparents out of their life savings (although those folks definitely exist), you're also dealing with a multi-billion health care industry that is already out there paying doctors millions to recommend their treatments over others. This is just an educated guess, but I'll bet good money that you're going to see major pharmaceutical companies and/or medical device company's buying up the TLDs associated with the diseases they treat. e.g. juvenilediabetes.health and then they'll invest a million (which is no skin off their nose) to make it the best resource for the disease out there. It won't just be informative, it will be useful. You'll be able to chat online with a doctor and find support on message boards, read inspirational stories and learn strategies for educating your kid on the disease. It will be so great that it will become the go-to site for any family fighting the disease. The only problem with the site will be their treatment recommendations. They're not dumb, they won't recommend their products for everyone, just almost everyone. They also won't publish the downsides of their medications or any adverse effects of their medication, which yes, parents can find on other sites, but they won't look for that information until/unless something goes wrong. Yes, ideally, doctors wouldn't prescribe medication just because a patient asks for it, but if that was the case, why do pharmaceuticals advertise so extensively? (Also these companies market to doctors so these would just be an extension of those efforts.)

I'm not saying my #2 (which I thought up in 30 seconds as I typed that response) is the answer. Although I do think a health wiki that you accessed simply by typing diseasename.health (vs. having to go through an entire wiki site would be helpful) but I do think its worth thinking through what the opportunity cost is here of not taking this opportunity to set up incentives to populate the Internet with useful, unbiased health information for patients versus giving for-profit health interests an unending stream of avenues to market themselves. Again, I'm not suggesting that I have the answer or that the answer is easy, only that it's a problem that we should be looking for ways to address.

The issue is that the policies shaping the future of the Internet are increasingly being made by for profit corporations & interests while the rest of us get shut out of the process (and might not even know there was a process if not for Techdirt.)

You're saying this shouldn't be an issue because it doesn't personally impact you is a little like my saying, I don't see why I should care about Net Neutrality since I only use the Internet for Facebook (I don't) or I don't care if the government is collecting my geolocation records because I don't go anywhere interesting.

Every time corporate or special interests co-opt a piece of the Internet's future for their own purposes, the Internet takes another step towards becoming an instrument for the few versus a platform for the many. And I think that's reason enough to oppose it.

Beyond that, there are reasons you should care:

1. Not everyone who uses the Internet is as savvy as you and the more for profit health providers are able to control the flow of information to (at least some) patients -- recommending pricey treatments and medications that patients might not need -- the more health care costs go up. Sky rocketing health care costs hurt everyone in the form of increased taxes and/or loss of government services, the availability of treatments and your employer's ability to raise your wages among many other things.

2. Opportunity Cost. Yes, you have a way to avoid the negative consequences of .health being purchased by a for profit spammer, but might you have benefitted from .health being used for a different purpose? Like...what if -- for example -- instead of selling .health to the highest bidder, ICANN granted it to a non-profit to turn it into a global health care wiki that would gather the collective wisdom and experience of doctors and health care experts around the world. Thus giving you immediate access to unbiased information and making it harder for pharma and other for profit actors in the health care sphere to control the flow of information re: their products, hide adverse effects, studies, etc....

ICANN is shaping the future of the Internet and steps like this not only take the Internet in the wrong direction, they mean we're forgoing an opportunity to take the Internet in a positive direction.

My friends who had FOIA-able federal government jobs knew -- and were always very careful -- not to send anything work related to or from their personal email accounts. They'd even set up separate work-only gmail accounts if they needed to send themselves documents to work on from home. (It's easier to work from gmail at home than remotely access your government email.) Because they knew that the second a work-related email touched their personal email account, the whole thing would become FOIA-able. I was basically put on notice that unless I wanted our long history of emails about happy hours and Lebron on the public record all work-related emails needed to be directed to their government account.

If those people really thought they were going to get away with this, they're idiots.

With all due respect, sir, I worked on Capitol Hill for 10 years, the White House for 2 and I have a masters degree in public policy from Harvard. I've been subjected to so much spin in my life that I can spot it at 100 paces blindfolded. I wouldn't be a very good communications strategist if I only read/considered issues from one perspective. Unlike some who's strategy for winning debates is to silence their opposition, I actually work to understand the opposition's side, so I can understand their thinking, address their concerns and counter their arguments (and maybe change their minds.)

Maybe it's not the textbook definition, but I define "public advocate" as someone who advocates for interests beyond their own. I'm not saying those people won't benefit from their advocacy (most public interest advocates got involved because of a personal experience) but that they're thinking of others, the future, etc. not just how to protect/grow themselves financially at the expense of the interests of others.. Techdirt continued its SOPA/PIPA advocacy even when it hurt them financially. And -- as I said -- that's the problem with public advocacy. While a special interest lobbyists could be making high six figures to devote themselves to making sure members of Congress understand their client's interests, most people who advocate for the public interest do it on their own time, for free. I don't know about you, but I think if we want to fix society/congress, etc. we need to find a way to make doing good just as profitable as screwing people. (Or at least a little profitable.)

Also - for the record - as I tried to explain in my post, Members of Congress and their staff are more likely to take a stand on an issue when they are confident in their knowledge of an issue. I might know that a lobbyist is spinning me, but I'm probably not going to pick a fight with them publicly unless I know enough about the issue to debate them. And - as I tried to explain -- there is so much going on that, you, as a staffer, might say to yourself. "When I get some time, I'm going to research that issue," but then you get so busy that 6 months later, you're like "shoot, I really wanted to learn about that, but now the debates over." I loved Techdirt because it gave me the user perspective on tech issues, that wasn't being represented in Washington, in an easily digestible and understood way. Understanding the issue made it possible for me to jump on communication opportunities in real time vs. backburnering them until I could learn more.

I don't take it personally. (Heck, I no longer work in Congress.) But there are a lot of people like me who work there, including pretty much everyone in Senator Wyden's office. The problem is the system does nothing to keep them those people there. The quality of life is pretty awful. The work isn't exactly fulfilling -- the bills you slave to write/negotiate get blown up to score political points -- and the media don't think you're worth covering. For years, I made it my personal mission to get the media to cover smart, bipartisan policy ideas (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2011-10-20/ron-wyden-senator-from-planet-where-congress-works -ezra-klein) but the spotlight almost always goes to those who are doing the opposite of being constructive.

I don't know how to fix it, other than we have to find a way to fix the incentives.

The pay sucks, the hours are brutal, (you basically eat, sleep and breath work) and everyone hates you. And you're right, the only people who really benefit when you start cutting Congressional staff pay are the lobbyists. It's a lot easier for them to convince a fresh faced staffer who makes $40K a year that they're right than someone who's been working on the issue for a decade or two.

You know, we've long been afraid that computers would rise to dominance by growing smarter than humans, but I'm starting to wonder if the computers' real plan is simply to best humans by making us dumber.

i.e. Could the growing obsession with clicks and nonfactual clickbait stories (about things like "super computers" passing the Turing test) just be evidence that their trojan horse is working on us? A few more years of this and a TI-81 could take over the planet.

I know the man brings up strong feelings. As I said, there are a lot of reasons to be mad at him/disagree with him. Trust me, I'm there.

But if we want things to change, making the Intel community out to be the enemy isn't going to work. It just confirms their opinion of their critics and convinces them they are right about everything including shutting the public out of these debates. (Which is why I'm trying to keep my commentary fact-based.) I mean, at the end of the day, Congress and the White House can mandate legislative reforms, but nothing changes if we can't get the Intel Community to buy in.

These guys think they are patriots trying to keep us safe. We need to get them to see that there are better ways to be patriotic and keep the country safe. That good intentions don't necessarily lead to good decisions.

I think President Obama's proposed reforms are a huge step in the right direction. I deserves credit for taking those steps and I commend him for doing it. Although I am troubled that they don't include closing the section 702 loophole, which is is a big enough subject for its own post.

I think one of the challenges with this debate is that it encompasses so many issues. i.e. most folks in this debate are actually debating different things. For example, I think each of the following are separate issues:

1.The programs themselves: Are these surveillance programs making our country safer/less safe and/or are there better ways to keep our country safe? So they strike the proper balance between national security and privacy? are they working as well as they could -- i.e. is information being shared, etc.
2. Legality: Does the administration - in fact - have the authority to conduct these programs. They obviously think they do, but do they and is their argument constitutional? How is this data collection not represent the kind of general warrants the founders deliberately wanted to prohibit?
3. Democracy - In a democratic society, the people are supposed to have a say in the laws that govern them, were they given a say here? Why not? Did the Administration have a good national security reason for denying the American people the information they needed to judge their leaders' actions on this issue or were they just afraid if the public found out what it was doing, they would take away some of their authority? Is the latter a good reason to classify information.
4. Classification/Leaks - Is our classification system working? Is information only being classified for national security reasons or is some of the information being declassified for reasons such as -- avoiding oversight and potential embarrassment? Is given the executive branch the sole authority to determine what is/is not classified working? Is cracking down on leakers the best way to protect national secrets?
5. Edward Snowden - Did he do the right thing? Is he a whistleblower or something else? Could we be having the debate we are currently having without him? Is the administration's treating him unfairly?

There are obviously other questions, but I laid these out to give you an idea just how diverse this topic is and that just because folks have an opinion on one aspect of the debate doesn't mean that they are on one side or the other because there are many, many sides. In other words, you can have concerns about the lack of oversight and still care about national security. You can have concerns about these programs and also have concerns about the way the information was disclosed. etc . etc. etc.

Anyway, I am VERY glad the President is taking this issue seriously and putting some excellent reform proposals on the table. Having worked for many of those reforms for many years, I commend him for taking those actions. But that doesn't mean I'm not still concerned about his administration's commitment to oversight and democracy and what I see as an irresponsible classification system that I would argue makes our country less safe by fostering disrespect for the classification system. Based on this Administration's previous actions and statements on those fronts, I have no reason to believe that they will continue to circumvent the democratic process when it is most convenient for them,

Just my two cents on this as someone who occasionally writes for online publications that allow comments.

Negative -- or extremely hostile -- comments don't violate free speech, but I do think it acts as a disincentive. Let me explain:

I can only speak for myself here, but when I take time to write posts like this one or ones I've done for my Huffington Post blog or even columns I wrote with Senator Wyden, I do it with the hope that I can help readers see the world differently or at least gain a better understanding of my point of view. I don't normally get paid for what I write and my writing has yet to drive any consulting clients my way. In fact, the above post probably ended my career in government communication consulting.

Now, while I admittedly wrote the above post in a five hour blur of coffee and prosecco (between midnight and 5 AM), I have often spent days if not weeks trying to formulate an argument that I hope will resonate with readers. And, when you put that kind of work into a post, it's really hard to read eviscerating comments written by people who clearly didn't read what you wrote and just what to tear into you for the headline or what they assume to know about you based on whatever they think they know about you.

Anyway, when I read comments like those, I start to ask myself why I bothered to write the piece in the first place, which makes me less eager to write again in the future. As I said in the above piece, I respect -- and even cherish -- the right folks have to write whatever they want online. And -- having worked in positions where I couldn't use my name without it reflecting on my boss or job etc -- I respect the right to post anonymously or under psydonyms. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt to have such words directed at me or something I've written and it has definitely discouraged me from participating in discussions.

Anyway, I wish more folks would ask themselves -- before posting those comments -- whether what they are writing is something they would be proud to put their name on. But I think the system that Mike has set up here at Techdirt is brilliant. In that it not only allows the Techdirt community to set the tone for its discussions, it offers incentives for folks to provide insight and even humor. It's -- obviously -- a conversation that I am much more eager to engage in.

(Btw. some sites -- even legitimate newspaper sites -- refuse to limit comments because they feel that giving crazy ranters a forum to rant, just drives traffic to their site. The fact that Techdirt cares more about driving constructive conversation to its site, versus a sheer volume of crazy is to be commended.)